By staff writer John Marcher

My friend and I were in a discussion recently about the best ways to get high legally. It all started when he began claiming, however erroneously, that you could get high from smoking banana peels. *Sigh* You'll have to cut Murph some slack, he isn't exactly an aficionado when it comes to drugs or drug culture, as the substance he's most familiar with is the Ritalin he took when he was in grade school. Once I explained to him the origins of this myth (The Anarchist Cookbook) and furthermore, the chemical inability of banana peels to do anything but raise your blood pressure and serotonin levels, we moved on to more concrete examples of legal intoxicants.

People will claim anything and everything is an intoxicant if it gets them some coin, but a lot of the substances people commonly claim in casual conversation as hallucinogens are in some small way actually psychoactive. This is because practically any substance, in large enough a dose, will produce an effect. Also, neurological breakdown itself can cause massive hallucinogenic effects. For example, if you were to drink a cup of Drano, you would no doubt see some wild shit…and then you would die. The human body works in mysterious ways…if you're religious. For those of us living in reality, it has another name: psychopharmacology.

But back to my discussion with Murph. After giving up on bananadine, he quickly began citing the only ways he knew of to get high just from a trip to the store. No doubt Robotussin, whippits, and inhalants of every shape and size adorn the shelves of your local drugstore or supermarket, too. But we were talking about legal ways to get high, and, as I reminded him, it's explicitly illegal to use those products in any manner other than which they were intended to be used.

Somewhat forlorn at having his paltry dreams squashed, I decided to throw him a bone and explain the two ways I know of to in fact get high legally: oxygen, and absinthe.

Oxygen in high enough doses can provide a temporary high, and is allegedly even beneficial for the immune system. In Japan and some parts of the United States, they have oxygen bars where you can inhale high concentrations of oxygen through a nasal cannula for a price. Fortunately for Murph, I had been to one. So I recounted to him the following story of my first and last oxygen bar experience.

My friend Berg used to work at a hotel in downtown Baltimore as a monkey-grinder. Okay, so he was actually a bellboy, but those cute little hats always remind me of monkey-grinders and I never miss a chance to remind him of that. Anyway, he claimed that a place called Spy Bar near his hotel they had an oxygen bar upstairs. So one night we decided to check it out.

We arrived at the Spy Bar on a Tuesday night and the place was fricken deserted. There wasn't even anyone upstairs by the weird looking machines that I had to guess produced the oxygen. After soliciting a bartender, and paying ten bucks each for ten minutes of oxygen, we got strapped in, and were ready to go. My first thought was, holy-shit this nasal cannula is uncomfortable as hell. I was an EMT for a while, and had dutifully shoved them in people’s noses with no regard many times over, never once stopping to think how painful it might be. But once the machine clicked on, I quickly forgot about all that and tried to concentrate on the task before me, inhaling the sweet sweet smell of…well…air.

My second observation was that these machines were really fucking loud. I'm talking loud like a vacuum cleaner. So loud you couldn't possibly have a conversation with a person sitting right next to you. Berg and I exchanged confused glances and started clicking through the different flavors they had to offer.

Mint: Ooooh! It's like brushing my teeth, except it's in my nose!

Cherry: Bleck, why does this flavor even exist anymore? The cough syrup industry ruined this for everyone born after 1980.

Grape: Woooooow, it's like someone took two grape ring pops and shoved them up my nose!

Watermelon: This was always my favorite flavor Jolly Rancher as a kid, and now I remember why.

After the novelty of checking out the different flavors wore off (all of about 90 seconds) I checked my watch and took a sip of my Corona. I tried to search my mental consciousness for some inkling of a high, but…there was nothing.

“Maybe it takes a while to kick in,” I thought to myself, as I tried to relax on the stool I was sitting on. How uncomfortable is a stool by the way? I don't think there is anything more uncomfortable than sitting on a stool that is too high off the ground for you to lean on the bar.

So there I was, stuck for the next eight minutes, sitting on an uncomfortable ass stool, not saying a word, listening to a fucking vacuum motor while I sipped down a mint-tinged Corona. By about the seventh minute, I couldn't wait for that shit to be over. In fact by the end, it was borderline painful. Once the motor cut off, Berg quickly concurred that that shit had sucked, and we guzzled our beers and blew that Popsicle stand, thinking about all the Jolly Ranchers, Ring Pops, and toothpaste we could have bought with the twenty bucks we spent.

Not surprisingly, Murph still figured it was worth a shot, probably because he’s the kind of guy who’d drink a strawberry-kiwi wine cooler at a frat party if you told him it tasted better than the fruit drinks people consume on a non-alcoholic basis. And who was I to argue—it was, after all, only oxygen. If you’re gonna start experimenting with legal highs, you might as well start with the most readily available substance around, right?

Absinthe, on the other hand, while not as readily available (technically, it’s illegal to sell it in the U.S., but it is legal to “possess and consume,” provided you’re willing to bring it from overseas or make it yourself), has a well-known reputation for producing psychoactive effects. Most people claim it induces a more clear-headed form of drunkenness, and somewhat of a “brain-warming” effect. I like to think of it as Everclear without the blackouts. Thus, I’ve had more than a few enlightening experiences with the Green Fairy. But by far my favorite person to drink it with was a friend of mine we call “Spills,” for his inevitable party foul early in the night, before anyone else.

Spills frequently travels in Europe and brings back quality bottles of absinthe from a variety of different countries and locales. He has accrued such a taste for the drink, that when he is on extended stay here in the States, he will even order do-it-yourself absinthe kits over the internet and brew absinthe himself. Before a long night of drinking, we would usually take a nip of whatever vintage he had laying around, complete with all the rituals and customs inherent to the practice as was customary during the drink’s heyday in the late 19th century.

One night I was over at his place drinking with some friends and it began to snow outside to the point that we scrapped the idea of going out at all. Shortly thereafter, Spills began claiming that if you consumed enough absinthe, your urine would become green, and glow in the dark. Not for a second convinced of his heinous claims, I told him it might get us really fucked up, but it’s no Ecto Cooler. Naturally, my rebuke only antagonized him further, to the point where a challenge was laid down that no red-blooded man could refuse.

And so it was that we consumed the remainder of an entire bottle of absinthe, if only for the purpose of investigating his outrageous claim. I don't remember whether we ended up testing the theory for real that night, but what I do remember is Spills screaming “I PISS HOT FIRE!” every five minutes in reference to the then-popular Chappelle Show skit based on Dylan from Da Band.

So Murph, you want my advice? Lay off the bananas and stick with the green stuff.

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